Samurai Legend Musashi
Samurai Shampoo
Tags: Samurai Legend Musashi Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Apr 13th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Samurai Legend Musashi (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action RPG | No | ||
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Back in the glory days of the PSOne and N64 (by this time, the Saturn was pushing up daisies), the hype was reaching fever pitch for Nintendo’s upcoming magnum opus, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. And as per usual in the so-called console wars, those preferring the opposing console searched high and low for a title they could hold up as their answer to the challenge. And so it was that, before either game even saw release, Brave Fencer Musashi came to be heralded as a would-be “Zelda-Killer”. Of course, upon release it became apparent that the two games shared little in common, and any sane person wouldn’t directly compare the two.
While both were action-adventure titles, Zelda reached for the skies with a vast, epic quest that’s now the stuff of legends. Musashi, on the other hand, worked on a much smaller scale, telling the tale of sarcastic warriors, bimbo princesses and an evil empire that both tasted great and was less-filling. It’s little surprise then, that the game was met with much the same response as Musashi himself. “This is the legendary warrior we’ve been waiting for!?”
Surprisingly, Brave Fencer Musashi ended up being a pretty darn good game. The action and RPG elements worked great together, the irreverant and often silly tone was endearing in spite of itself, and what it lacked in scale it made up for in depth. How unfortunate, then, that its follow-up should fail at everything the first game got right.
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For starters, it’s almost hard to classify Musashi: Samurai Legend as a sequel. The game mechanics are totally different, as is the style and theme of the game. Furthermore, the only character to carry over from the first game is Musashi himself, and he’s undergone such a dramatic makeover he’s hardly recognizable. While Musashi still has an outlandishly ridiculous hairdo (actually moreso: it now trails behind him a few feet as he runs around), it’s no longer the signature blue from before. He’s also gone from being short and unimpressive-looking (traits the characters were quick to point out) to the standard generic anime-esque hero look (with a dash of anorexia and half the clothes… *shudders*). Even the character himself has changed, no longer the blunt, overconfident, sarcastic lout of the first game, but now just… standard do-gooder.
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This attitude (or lack therof) has spread to the rest of the game. Once you get past the aging martial arts guru in the body of a widdle kitty cat, you’re left with a cast of mild-mannered (or spunky!) damsels in distress, worrying townsfolk, and villains who speak enigmatically about secret plans and make grandiose statements about how you couldn’t possibly defeat them. Come on! The first game had a midget samurai battling a villainess in a mouse outfit by besting her in a dance contest… why did this farce of a sequel seemingly plumb the depths of anime hell to find the most generic characters imaginable!?
To add insult to injury, this game is in a close race with Baten Kaitos and Resident Evil for the much-coveted “Worst Voice acting in a videogame… EVER!” award. While Brave Fencer featured voice acting that was seemingly intentionally bad (to go with the wacky theme), this game’s is far worse. For example, I’d imagine that to get Musashi’s voice, Square Enix found the woman that voices Ash Ketchum in Pokemon, got her really drunk, then roughed her up a bit for good measure. Yeah, it’s really that bad. And it deserves mention that, unlike Baten Kaitos, you can’t turn the voice acting off.
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In the graphics department, this is another one of those cel-shaded games, implementing the style in a way Square Enix refers to as “manga shading”, which apparently translates into “big fat ugly outlines instead of tastefully subtle ones”. Being that Square Enix recently enlisted Level-5 to create Dragon Quest VIII, which has arguably the best traditional cel-shading to ever be used in a videogame, one would think Square Enix would have taken the opportunity to learn from the masters. Apparently not, and it’s a shame because the overbearing cel shading detracts from what would have otherwise been a very nice presentation, with decent lighting and water effects, and colorful locales.
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Finally, there’s the gameplay, which abandons much of the depth that made the first game so great. The day-night system is gone, as with the intricate mechanics of the first game’s hub town. The level designs remove most of the platforming elements of the first game, and the RPG elements are greatly muted too, bringing much of the game’s focus on the combat. Sadly, it just ain’t good enough to bear the weight of the game. Musashi attacks with canned combos that are actually less effective than single attacks repeated until the enemy is defeated, thanks to a moment of vulnerability at the end of the combo where Musashi pauses breifly. Regardless of how you do it, enemies take quite a few hits before going down, and respawn literally, making progressing through some areas slow to a crawl while you take out the trash. Players can also learn attacks from enemies, which involves getting hit repeatedly until you get your button timing just right. Even then, techniques vary in their usefulness, and generally your repeated attacks will do just fine on most enemies, at least until they start to swarm you.
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While combat is largely brainless, the camera often makes it more difficult than it needs to be, apparently borrowing Kingdom Hearts’ “To close, too low, and not interactive enough” camera. And while Musashi has a limited ability to combat this problem by locking on to enemies, even this mechanic is a tad broken, as it requires players to be relatively close, and enemies seem to have a knack for breaking target lock (especially annoying when trying to focus on one to copy their ability).
I know it may seem I’m being kinda’ harsh here. After all, Musashi: Samurai Legend is a fairly decent generic action-adventure in spite of its problems. However, for the sequel to one of the PSOne’s most underrated, original and fun titles, to merely be a decent generic action-adventure seems something of a disappointment.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Well... The gameplay is decent + Err... And the graphics are decent |
6.9 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Decent-schmecent. The gameplay is dumbed-down and even occasionally annoying - And the graphics would have been much better if they hadn't piled on the cel-shading like an obsessive-compulsive manga artist - The camera is awful - The voice acting is catastrophically bad - The plot and characters are so generic as to be insulting |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| A decent but not great action-adventure, and really, a poor follow-up to the PSOne game | |
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Tags: Samurai Legend Musashi
Posted by Jake McNeill on Apr 13th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
